Former President Bill Clinton accepts the Dean’s Award for Public Leadership as part of the Humphrey School of Public Affairs’ yearlong series of events reflecting on progress achieved and challenges ahead in the 50th anniversary year of the Civil Rights Act of 1964. From left: Clinton, Eric P. Schwartz, Professor and Dean of the Humphrey School, Josie Johnson, African American educator, activist and administrator, and Eric Kaler, President of the University of Minnesota. The Public Leadership Awards honor individuals who have contributed to the common good through leadership and service. (Pioneer Press: Scott Takushi)

The passage of the Civil Rights Act in 1964 was a moral triumph but also a victory for a now rare type of politics that emphasized trust and compromise, former President Bill Clinton told an audience at the University of Minnesota on Monday.

“Devote yourself to the challenges of today,” he told attendees in an address at Northrop Auditorium after receiving the Dean’s Award for Public Leadership from the Humphrey School of Public Affairs. The Civil Rights Act, which Humphrey was crucial to passing, will never fade in importance, Clinton said, because “we will always fight to assert our common humanity over our important and interesting differences.”

The 42nd president spoke for about 70 minutes.

He said it took trust for Martin Luther King Jr. to agree with President Lyndon Johnson’s plan to take the Voting Rights Act out of the civil rights bill and push it separately the next year. Former Israeli Prime Minister Yitzhak Rabin and PLO leader Yasser Arafat had to trust one another when negotiating lines on Middle East maps, Clinton said.

These days, we’ve become less racist, sexist and homophobic, Clinton said, but “our one remaining bigotry” is that we don’t want to be around people who disagree with us, and we don’t trust our opponents enough to resolve conflicts.

As a result, problems ranging from the cost of college to income inequality to Medicaid expansion go unsolved, he said.

Ten-year-old Abby Kahn of Mendota Heights seemed to get the message.

“I learned that you can actually relate life to a termite and a bee,” Abby said afterward, referring to a reference Clinton made to ants, termites, bees and people being the most resilient life forms because they are the greatest cooperators. She pledged to try to be more bee-like, but “I don’t know if I’ll succeed.”

Clinton, 67, was selected for the award based on his work throughout his career, said Humphrey Dean Eric Schwartz. It made sense as part of the celebration of the 50th anniversary of the Civil Rights Act to honor someone who embodied characteristics that Humphrey valued, Schwartz said.

He talked about Clinton’s “really unshakable optimism about efforts to promote the public good and his perseverance in doing so” as well as his “love of politics and his joy in the process of engaging with others and learning from them.”

Clinton spoke for no fee, Schwartz said. Attendees paid $50 per ticket, and Schwartz estimated the event will raise $120,000 to $150,000 for scholarships at the school to promote diversity and inclusion. University statistics for fall 2012 show a 7 percent African-American enrollment at the Humphrey School and 4 percent at the Twin Cities campus overall.

“We have so much more work to do at the Humphrey School and at the University of Minnesota. None of us is happy with the numbers and the percentages of students from underrepresented groups, and we are taking a series of measures to try to address that,” Schwartz said, including the scholarship money raised by Clinton’s appearance.

Additional public leadership awards are being handed out later this month to Vernon Jordan Jr., former president of the National Urban League; former U.S. Sen. Howard Baker; General Mills for its commitment to diversity and equity; Chandra Smith Baker, president and CEO of Pillsbury United Communities; and Humphrey grad Sherri Knuth, policy and outreach manager for the League of Women Voters Minnesota.

The awards, started more than a decade ago, are intended to honor people who have contributed to the public good.

Former Secretary of State Condoleezza Rice spoke in April at Northrop as part of the Humphrey School’s Distinguished Carlson Lecture Series, also in celebration of the 50th anniversary celebration of the Civil Rights Act. Her appearance drew criticism from those who objected to her service in the George W. Bush administration and to the $150,000 fee she was paid.

Since Clinton left the presidency in 2001, he has kept a high profile as head of an eponymous foundation devoted to humanitarian, environmental and health-related projects worldwide.

He was in St. Paul in July for the Starkey Hearing Foundation awards gala, and he came to Minnesota in 2012 for the dedication of the Hubert Humphrey statue at the state Capitol in August and again before the election to stump for President Barack Obama.

“He believed that public service was a worthy endeavor,” Clinton said of Humphrey at the August 2012 event. “He believed that his adversaries need not be his enemies. … Hubert Humphrey believed that our founding fathers were serious when they pledged their lives … to form a more perfect union.”

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